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China ’s “Uyghur Problem” and the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization
Paper prepared for the U.S.-China
Ecomonic & Security Review Commission Hearings
Washington , DC
3 August 2006
Dru C. Gladney
Article Link
 In
early 2006, the U.S. released to Albania five Chinese
citizens, all of them Uyghur Muslim detainees,
formerly held in the Guantánamo detention center in
Cuba, whom they had determined to be “non-combatants”
among at least 22 other Uyghurs from China’s Xinjiang
Uyghur Autonomous Region. Prior to this release,
Chinese citizens were the fourth largest group held in
detention (after Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and
Afghanistan). The holding of Chinese citizens who are
Muslim Uyghurs is directly related to Sino-U.S.
cooperation on the war on terrorism, and it will be
argued in this testimony, entirely responsible for the
shifting role of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
in the late 1990s from a trade and border resolution
organization to a security coordination organization.
In the summer of 2002, both the United States and the
United Nations supported China’s claim that an
organization known as the East Turkestan Islamic
Movement (ETIM) should be recognized as an
international terrorist organization. China, we know,
makes little distinction between separatists,
terrorists, and civil rights activists – whether they
are Uyghurs, Tibetans, Taiwanese, or Falun Gong
members. Are the restive Uyghurs of Xinjiang
terrorists, separatists, or freedom fighters? How does
fundamentalist or radical Islam play into the
organizations active inside and outside the region (in
Central Asia, Europe, and the U.S.)? What role does
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization play in
resolving China’s “Uyghur problem” and other wider
unrest in Central Asia? What is the role of the SCO in
counter-terrorism, how should the U.S. view the SCO in
the region, and what should its policy be toward the
organization?
Xinjiang and China’s “Uyghur Problem”
In 2004, a collaboration of mainly U.S. scholars
published a collection of academic articles that has
been banned in China (in English and Chinese
translations) for addressing a taboo subject, that of
China’s “Xinjiang problem” (see Frederisk S. Starr,
Editor, Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Frontier, M.E. Sharpe,
2004). This testimony will further refine that
analysis and examine the role of the SCO in addressing
anti-terrorism, what for China might be called it’s
“Uyghur problem.”
After denying the problem for decades and stressing
instead China's "national unity," official reports and
the state-run media began in early 2001 to detail
terrorist activities in the province officially known
as the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Prior to the
release of this document by the State Council, and the
subsequent media reports, the term “Eastern Turkestan”
was not allowed to be used in the official media, and
anyone found using the term or referring to Xinjiang
as Eastern Turkestan could be arrested, even though
this is the term most often used outside China to
refer to the region by Uyghurs and other
Turkic-speaking people. A brief look at a map of the
region (see Figure 1) and its bordering states will
immediately reveal the strategic location of the
region and the clear source of its problems. Since the
dissolution of the former USSR in 1991, Xinjiang
became the only province in China bordered by 8
countries, 5 of them mostly Muslim.
In the northwestern Uyghur Autonomous Region of
Xinjiang, China’s State Council and the official media
have detailed an on-going series of incidents of
terrorism and separatism since the large riot in the
Xinjiang town of Yining of February 1997, with
multiple crackdowns and arrests that have rounded up
thousands of terrorist suspects, large weapons caches,
and printed documents allegedly outlining future
public acts of violence. Amnesty International has
claimed that these round-ups have led to hurried
public trials and immediate, summary executions of
possibly thousands of locals. One estimate suggested
that in a country known for its frequent executions,
Xinjiang had the highest number, averaging 1.8 per
week, most of them Uyghur.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Xinjiang
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) can to be
seen to have its origins in China’s “Xinjiang problem”
in its inception as the “Shanghai 5” in 1996, the same
year China launched its “Strike Hard” campaign against
“splittests” in Xinjiang. International campaigns for
Uyghur rights and possible independence have become
increasingly vocal and well organized, especially on
the internet. International organizations are
increasingly including Uyghur indigenous voices from
the expatriate Uyghur community. Notably, the 1995
elected chair of the Unrepresented Nations and
People's Organization (UNPO) based in the Hague is a
Uyghur, Erkin Alptekin, son of the separatist leader,
Isa Yusuf Alptekin, who is buried in Istanbul where
there is a park dedicated to his memory. The elected
leader of the Washington based, Uyghur American
Association, is now Ms. Rebiya Kadeer, who until last
year languished in a Chinese prison but was released
due to U.S. and other human rights organizations
pressure. Supporting primarily an audience of mostly
expatriate Uyghurs, there are nearly 50 international
organizations and web sites working for the
independence of “Eastern Turkestan,” and based in
Amsterdam, Munich, Istanbul, Melbourne, Washington, DC
and New York. Following 11 September 2001, the vast
majority of these organizations disclaimed any support
for violence or terrorism, pressing for a peaceful
resolution of on-going conflicts in the region.
Nevertheless, the growing influence of
“cyber-separatism” is of increasing concern to Chinese
authorities seeking to convince the world that the
Uyghurs do pose a real domestic and international
terrorist threat.
After examining the available evidence regarding
incidents in the region related to Uyghur separatism
and violence, the Starr volume concluded:
A further error that easily arises from the correct
recognition of Xinjiang’s importance to Beijing
concerns the sources of the separatist and Islamist
currents it seeks to extirpate. Many analysts,
including senior officials in Beijing, assume that
these tendencies have arisen either from cultural or
ethnic diehards among the local Uyghurs who pine for a
past that never was, or from the efforts of subversive
forces from abroad, whether from Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, or from neighboring
states in Central Asia. Such an assumption excludes
from consideration what is arguably the main driver,
namely, Chinese policies themselves. Dru Gladney’s
review of Chinese policies of development and control
in Chapter III advances precisely this thesis, as does
Linda Benson’s analysis of educational policy in
Chapter VI, and Stan Toops’ discussion of ecology in
Chapter IX (Starr 2004: 6).
In a separate independent review of the violence in
the region that has tapered off considerably since the
late 1990s when it reached its apex, the Oxford
Analytical concluded:
Distinguishing between genuine counter-terrorism and
repression of minority rights is difficult and the
Uighur case points to a lack of international
guidelines for doing so. In any case, Chinese policies,
not foreign-sponsored terrorism, are the cause of
Uighur unrest. China's development and control policy
in Xinjiang is unlikely to stabilize the region as
long as development benefits remain so unevenly
distributed ( Oxford Analytica 20 December 2002: 2).
The SCO and Counter-Terrorism
Little has changed in the region with respect to the
Uyghur since these earlier studies. The main
transformations have been economic and political in
the wider Central Asian region, and the rising
importance of the SCO is related to these changes. The
transformation of the SCO from its origins as a trade
and border resolution organization into its current
organization directly concerned with security
cooperation can be seen in the outline below. While
China faced 5 new countries on its borders in the
early 1990s, by mid-2000, it had resolved all of its
border agreements and delineation with ever country on
its western border except for India. The Indian border
dispute dates from the Sino-India war in 1965, and
does not appear to be resolvable in the near future.
The following Figure 2 illustrating the shifting role
of the SCO in the region.
The real question is, what changes in the region have
the events of September 11 th wrought in terms of
local response to Chinese rule? It is clear that the
so-called separatist activities are not new and that
China is taking advantage of the international war on
terrorism to attempt to eradicate a domestic problem.
The Istanbul-based groups have existed since the
1950s, the Central Asian Uyghurs under Soviet rule
received tremendous support in their anti-China
rhetoric regarding policies in Xinjiang, and the
Uyghurs have been increasingly vocal since the
independence of the Central Asian Republics in 1991
led many to hope for an independent Uyghuristan would
have followed on the heels of the other newly
independent -stans. Separatist actions have taken
place on a small but regular basis since the expansion
of market and trade policies in China, and with the
opening of six overland gateways to Xinjiang in
addition to the trans-Eurasian railway, and China’s
Western development campaign, there seems to be no
chance of closing up shop. The Chinese government
itself in a landmark 1999 white paper, admitted
serious economic shortfalls in the region despite 50
years of state investment in the development of the
region: “The Chinese government is well aware of the
fact that…central and western China where most
minority people live, lags far behind the eastern
coastal areas in development.”
Uyghur Yearnings and the SCO
History has not been kind to the Uyghur over the last
two millennia. Like the Kurds and Chechens, their
legacies of earlier empire and kingdom never produced
viable nations or states. After initially welcoming
the PRC as “liberators” in the 1950s, the region
gradually lost any real autonomy as Beijing tightened
its control. It was clear that the post-Cultural
Revolution period in the region was welcomed by most
Xinjiang residents due to the harsh treatment of
minorities and religious practitioners between 1966
and 1976. Indeed, many Muslims point to the 20 years
of discrimination against religious practice since the
initiation of the Religious System Reform Campaign in
1958, which led throughout the country to the further
consolidation and restriction of religious practice.
It was during this period that most of the mosques in
the region were built or reopened, Islamic training of
young Imams permitted, and pilgrimages to Mecca
resumed. Indeed, there are many residents of Xinjiang,
Uyghurs included, who continue to strongly support the
Deng Xiaoping reforms as they have been continued
under Jiang Zemin and now Hu Juntao. As loyal citizens,
they see the dramatic progress made since the end of
the Cultural Revolution and generally share in the
government’s vision of a modernized, developed
Xinjiang region. Working not only in the state sector
as cadres, teachers, production corps farmers, and
factory workers, but also in the growing private
sector in private and semi-private small businesses,
these supporters of the state’s development program
are generally quite unwilling to listen to any
criticism of state policies, especially from outsiders
or disgruntled minorities. Given the lack of public
polling or uncensored media in the region, it is
difficult to ascertain if these supporters are a
silent majority or a tiny minority, speaking out in
support of state policies because it serves their
interest. Nevertheless, the Deng reform era in general
can be characterized as a period of heightened loyalty
to the state and new-found optimism after the previous
20 years of internal chaos and repression, similar in
many respects to the period of relative loyalty when
Xinjiang was first brought into the PRC and
established as an Autonomous Region.
However, in the late 1980s and mid-1990s, this period
of “loyalty” gave way to increasing expressions of
dissent, not only among Uyghur but also among a wide
cross-section of local residents that felt the
northwest was not keeping pace with the rapid
development of the rest of the country. Whether there
were smaller, unreported expressions of voice in the
past, the mid-1990s witnessed a number of public
expressions of contrary views and dissatisfaction with
state policies in the region.
In the late 1990s, the government responded with a
host of arrests and new policy announcements. In
Spring 1998, the National Peoples Congress passed a
New Criminal Law that redefined
“counter-revolutionary” crimes to be “crimes against
the state,” liable to severe prison terms and even
execution. Included in “crimes against the state” were
any actions considered to involve “ethnic
discrimination” or “stirring up anti-ethnic sentiment.”
Despite on-going tensions and frequent reports of
isolated terrorist acts, there has been no evidence
that any of these actions have been aimed at
disrupting the economic development of the region.
Most confirmed incidents have been directed against
Han Chinese security forces, recent Han Chinese
émigrés to the region, and even Uyghur Muslims
perceived to be too closely collaborating with the
Chinese Government. Two exceptions include a reported
derailment of a Xinjiang train due to a bombing on
February 12, 1997 and an attack on a power station in
Hejing on July 10, 1999. These incidents, and the
Beijing and Urumqi bus bombings of 1997, represent the
only examples of well-organized terrorist activities
directed against civilians. If one were to examine all
incidents of civil unrest, assassinations, and
bombings in China since 1990, very few would be
actually traceable to Uyghur separatist groups or
events in Xinjiang. One unpublished report revealed
that of 140 publicly reported “terrorist” incidents in
China between 1990-2000, only 25 can be connected to
political causes or separatism, and only 17 events can
be connected to Xinjiang or Uyghur separatists. The
vast majority of incidents are best described as
isolated cases of worker discontent and civil unrest,
in a country that reported nearly 84,000 incidents of
civil unrest in 2005 alone.
Since the high-point of the late 1990s expressions of
voice and ethnic violence, there has been a gradual
decline in the scale and number of incidents.
Documented separatist and violent incidents in
Xinjiang have dropped off dramatically since the late
1990s. China's Uyghur separatists are small in number,
poorly equipped, loosely linked, and vastly out-gunned
by the People's Liberation Army and People's Police.
Though many of them find solace and some support in
radical Islam, most are concerned more with issues of
sovereignty, land rights, and fair treatment by the
government in a land they regard as an occupied region.
Indeed, some of the most active Uyghur “separatists”
have been urban-based secularists and nationalists,
not radical Islamicists.
Nevertheless, the government has consistently rounded
up any Uyghur suspected of being “too” religious,
especially those identified as Sufis or the so-called
Wahabbis (a euphemism in the region for strict Muslim,
not an organized Islamic school). These periodic
roundups, detentions, and public condemnations of
terrorism and separatism have not erased the problem,
but have forced it underground, or at least out of the
public’s eye, and increased the possibility of
alienating Uyghur Muslims even further from mainstream
Chinese society. It is also important to note, that
while the Uyghur Muslims are less than half of China’s
21 million Muslims, as reported in the year 2000
census, the majority of China’s other Muslims,
especially the Chinese-speaking Hui Muslims, are
completely unsympathetic to Uyghur calls for
independence. This is especially true of the Kazakh,
Kyrgyz, and Tajik populations, all of whom live almost
entirely in Xinjiang. Many fear an independent
“Eastern Turkestan” would be for the Uyghurs primarily
and have no place for them, just we see taking place
in Central Asia.
The shift of the SCO from mainly a trade and border
resolution in the late 1990s – something that it
accomplished quite effectively – into an
anti-terrorist security cooperation organization after
2001, has met with mixed success. While the incidents
of violence in Xinjiang have decreased precipitously,
most visitors to the region report that anger and
resentment continues to simmer, even as the government
continues to report frequent arrests. In Central Asia,
groups like the hizbut-tahrir, which call for an
independent Islamic Caliphate, continue to proliferate
and grow in popularity despite concerted efforts by
each government to stamp them out. The SCO has been
responsible for greater security cooperation between
China and its neighbor states, yet it is not clear if
this cooperation has produced more than the occasional
repatriation of suspected separatists (by some
accounts, China has had over 100 Uyghurs repatriated
from Central Asia back to Xinjiang, including the
celebrated case from this March of Huseyn Celil a
Canadian citizen who was detained in Tashkent, and
then forced to return from Uzbekistan back to China
against his will). While this paper is not concerned
with the economic dimensions of the SCO, it is clear
that economic, political, and military cooperation has
been almost completely bilateral. Thus, even in the
area of anti-terrorism cooperation, most actions have
been bilateral in nature, rather than any widespread
coordinated effort at anti-terrorism cooperation
through military actions, intelligence pooling, or
resolution of challenges. Growing political
instability and protests, most notably in Uzbekistan
and Kyrgyzstan, has signaled the increasing importance
of the SCO in security enforcement, rather than trade
or economic exchange.
Clearly, China needs a new approach to resolve
tensions in Xinjiang; purely Marxist and Keynesian
economic development strategies are not enough. The
“Develop the West” campaign launched in the late
1990s, has slowed considerably since September 11,
2001, and international tourism has slowed
dramatically in the region. The state’s economic
investment plan has proven not to be a panacea for
resolving on-going ethnic and problems in the region,
that are based on more than just poverty. Although
organized resistance and violent actions have declined
precipitously since their highpoint in the late 1990s,
it is clear that tensions remain and many problems are
unresolved. While some travelers to the region report
almost no obvious incidents of protest or dissent,
those who stray from the group, speak local languages,
or have long-term friendships or relatives in the
region report very different experiences. It is clear
that the “real” public opinion lies somewhere in the
middle, and until greater access to the region or
media liberalization takes place, tensions will
continue to simmer below the surface. In a July-August
2002 Foreign Affairs article, Chien-Peng Chung of the
Singaporean Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies,
called for a immediate political changes in the region
to avoid further deterioration in ethnic relations.
Few listened to this call or other criticisms of
Beijing’s policies in the region.
China is a sovereign state, and like all modern
nations in the era of globalization faces tremendous
challenges from migration, economic imbalance, ethnic
unrest, and cyber-separatism. The future of this
vastly important region, which Owen Lattimore once
called the “pivot of Asia,” depends upon it. The
sources of discontent for Uyghur opposition groups, as
Oxford Analytica outlines, remain the same: massive
unrestricted Han migration to the region, dramatically
increasing gap between the wealthy and mainly Uyghur
poor, decreasing educational opportunities for poorer
residents related to the market economy, higher
mortality rates among Uyghur, unresolved health
problems due to nuclear testing in the region, and
increased restriction on religious and cultural
practices.
The SCO: An Early Demise?
The SCO remains as a forum for mainly bilateral
cooperation between China and its member states. The
fact that it has not expanded beyond its 2001
inclusion of Uzbekistan to include other neighboring
countries, such as Mongolia, Pakistan, India, and
Nepal, suggest that the organization will remain
focused on Central Asia and serve primarily in
bilateral trade, economic, and security cooperation.
Its early success as a border delineation organization,
which was also bilateral in process and nature, has
not been followed by strengthened multi-lateral
cooperation or resolution of on-going security,
economic, and trade challenges facing its member
states. Though it may be too early to pronounce its
pre-adolescent demise, after 6 years the SCO can
report very few major regional initiatives. Ongoing
disputes affecting the entire region, such as energy,
water, trade, terrorism, environmental degradation,
migration, smuggling, and the rapidly expanding drug
trade, have not significantly diminished nor has the
SCO played any measurable multi-lateral role in
addressing the issues. Despite great fanfare, the SCO
has produced little evidence of growing into a
fully-fledged regional cooperation organization.
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